A few months ago, I decided to add Bluetooth to my computer so I could use my mobile phone’s Bluetooth headset with games that support in-game chat and other VoIP applications. I purchased a USB Bluetooth adapter, installed the provided software, and was very pleased with it overall. However, I was surprised to find that the installer dropped a “My Bluetooth Places” icon on the desktop that could not be removed.

Is Bluetooth so important that it needs to be accessable 24×7 from a location that I try to keep as clean as possible? I think not…

There are two ways to remove the My Bluetooth Places desktop icon. The first method only affects the current user, while the second method is a system-wide change that affects all users.

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on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Windows XP.
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Revision History

2005.10.23

Initial revision.

Disclaimer

I do not offer a warranty or guarantee for anything described in this article. All of my tips are based on personal and professional experience, but you are solely responsible for your own actions. Please backup your data first, and exercise extreme caution when using this information, which could leave your machine unbootable, unstable, or simply unusable!

Here’s something more challenging than just the icon! I installed BT for similar reasons. It’s got itself in all the ‘Sent to’ menus. No problem in principle apart from it’s got into the File menu in (MS Office 2000) PowerPoint and it’s NOT greyed out when there is no PPT file opened. I strongly suspect this is the reason why I now get a failure message everytime I close PowerPoint, viz. “PowerPoint found an error that it can’t correct. You should save presentations, quit then restart PowerPoint.” Removing BT from the Windows Explorer file that lists the ‘Send to’ sinks does not affect the Office application file menus. MS Word is OK – BT is greyed out when no DOC file opened. I presume this means that there’s something amiss in the registry – ideas?

Just wanted to say thanks!!! I love searching the web for solutions to my problems (those that I can actually fix – computerwise)…and I wanted to thank you for helping me get rid of that annoying Bluetooth icon!! 🙂 Hurray!

Hey man, Thanks for your post… i too was pondering how to get rid of this annoying icon from my desktop but your option 2 helped me with that… However, i suggest just renaming the key by adding a “_” without the quotes at the beginning and end of the key name… having done that, you have the disabled key right there so that you can rename it back into action should you wish to do that later…
It worked for me, so thought of sharing with all you good people…
Cya.. and thank you again for the post…

My problem is as follows. I bought a Samsung UGH600 at Christmas and the pics I have taken with the phone are superb. But when I load the disc that was supplied with the phone it loads but noway can I get my comp to accept the phone when I plug in to my USB port. Tried everything to no avail, So then bought a Bluetooth Dongle and loaded the disc with that. But it loads and bugger all happens when I click on the Desktop Icon. I am getting really frustrated can anyone help Mac